Comparisons Between Year 1 and Year 19

I posted earlier that I recently came upon my online journal that included our dating years and those first years of our marriage.  On it's own it was a bit eye opening and gave me some really good perspective about things I saw all the way from the beginning but choose to accept because that is what I thought you did when you loved someone.

This week I have come across some of my writing from May through July of this year.  This was what felt like a time of limbo where he had started verbalizing that he was reconsidering the relationship but he hadn't made a final decision.

I have two really big take-aways from reading those posts.  

First, I handled that time period better than I thought.  I tried to open up a dialogue and really listen to him.  I took in what he was saying and tried to understand it from his point of view.  I asked good questions that I think both reflected my support of him and our marriage and also tried to get him to self-reflect a bit.  Before reading these journal entries I only remembered the emotion and there probably was too much of that but in between the motion was a lot of rational thought and a lot of empathy.

Second, he is still in the same emotional space he was when I married him.  My descriptions of how he responded to conflict, questions, etc. are eerily similar in both 2005/2006 as they are in 2024.  Any topic he didn't want to talk about he found a way to avoid - disappearing into video games or a book, deflecting the question back on me, finding something related to blame on me, changing the subject, etc.  

It was this dance we did throughout our marriage that I spent the last 19 years trying to manage by improving my communication skills, learning new coping skills, and finding new ways to respond to him.  Except the results were always the same.  Because he never grew or worked on his half of the dance.  It didn't matter if I softened my voice or re-worded my responses or spend more time listening and repeating back to him my understanding or asking probing questions to keep the dialogue moving or verbalizing assumptions and asking for clarification to try to clear up misunderstandings.  He wasn't hearing it.